Asymmetrical Relationships: A Reflection and Response

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Moses Ebe Ochonu

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Jun 27, 2021, 9:17:10 AM6/27/21
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Asymmetrical friendships and relationships are very difficult to maintain because they are fraught with misunderstandings and misconceptions.

 

By asymmetrical relationships I mean relationships in which one party has clear socioeconomic superiority over the other. Such relationships could be either vertical or horizontal.

Both parties in an asymmetrical relationship are often guilty of acting on assumptions, stereotypes, and fears, which are not always unfounded but are sometimes not derived from the conduct of the party under scrutiny.

 

The less successful person in the relationship suspects that the richer, more successful party will snob, shun, and look down on them, so they walk on egg shells and sometimes avoid getting too close to their more successful friend. They fear being treated shabbily, being humiliated. 

 

They assume that money and success make people prideful, conceited, and spiteful (which is often but not always true), and they don't want to be victims of that attitude, so they proceed with caution and hesitation in the relationship. 

 

Some of them even avoid their more successful friends, believing that the friend would assume that they're getting close in order to ask for assistance. Treasuring their dignity, they suspend the friendship so they don't have to risk humiliation and rudeness.

For the more successful friend, the assumption/anxiety is simple: "will this friend look past my success and love me for me?" And will they think that I am a different person now that I am successful? 

 

Another assumption is, "does this person still care for me as a friend or will our friendship now be mediated by how much material benefit they can derive from me?" Yet another one is, "how can I know if my success is not the reason why my less successful friends are relating with me?"


As a result of these mutual anxieties and assumptions, there is tension and awkwardness in asymmetrical relationships.

 

The friendship proceeds gingerly, but it is punctuated by moments of awkwardness, unease, and pretense, with each party concerned that the other party perceives them differently now and that this places a burden and a strain on the relationship.

 

 

 

Marius Kothor

I wonder what we might see if we think of this asymmetry as fundamentally about "power" not "success." The idea of success implies that a person has worked for something and achieved it. Sometimes that is not the root of the asymmetry, it can be random. Luck, being at the right place at the right time, having access to networks or privilege, race, gender etc..can, in the right context, set someone up for "success" and thus give them much more power over other people. Now, because power (money, influence, status etc) corrupts people it is logical that the person with less power should become cautious around the person with more power. Power is dangerous. Across time and space people with power have shown that they are inclined to abuse it. So being suspicious of someone with power is self preservation. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the person with more power to prove that they aren't going to use it to harm the other person(s). That is the price of having power, the onus is on the powerful to show that they are going to behave themselves. I also wonder if any relationship can sustain the idea that there is an "asymmetry" embedded in the relationship. I think as soon as that idea creeps in then the friendship is doomed. I am friends with people who are more privileged than I am but I don't think of myself as being in an asymmetrical relationship with anyone (unless, of course, they are my elders) because we are all bringing something valuable to the relationship, which is why we're are friends in the first place. Maybe the idea that there is an asymmetry is the cause of all these anxieties to begin with?

 

 

Moses Ochonu

Marius, thanks for this perceptive take. I agree and your insight here introduces another important dimension to the matter. But I have two clarifications to make. One is that, while I totally agree that "privilege" is the more appropriate operative word here than "success" for the reasons you articulated, in the Nigerian (perhaps African) cultural context that my post is grounded in, the expansive, capacious notion of success already accounts for privilege, whether that privilege is the result of divine or structural favor, luck, chance, corruption, favoratism, power, abuse of access, inherited status or identities such as race, gender, class. 

 

Certainly, in Nigeria, there are many vernacular philosophical and moral-economic articulations of this expansive idea of success that I will not bore you with, which depart from the narrower Western notion of success, your critique of which is spot on---and which certainly denies unearned privilege and luck, being rooted in the intersection of Western capitalism and white supremacy. 

 

The second point is that I was referring to relationships in which the parties knew each other since they both were and had nothing (colloquially speaking--mostly relationships in which they grew up together. The dynamic of awkwardness and unease and tension is the result of this extensive prior familiarity and intimacy in the days of symmetrical and horizontal statuses and relations. This is precisely what introduces tension into the relationship because one party is suddenly more "privileged" or "successful" than the other and this disrupts or upends the balance of the relationship. Neither party knows how to proceed, how to reset the relationship to its previous balance, hence the awkwardness, assumptions, mutual suspicions, and caution. Asymmetrical relationships in which there is no such prior history of equality and equal interactions are not the same as the one I was postulating, although they may have their own tensions. 

 

Finally, I cannot agree with you more that the main problematic is the very idea, construct, or perception of "asymmetry" in a relationship. My concern is however not about how that perception or construct came about or whether it is problematic--it definitely is--but rather about the perception being real and consequential on the part of BOTH parties in the relationship, and also about asymmetry being constructed and sustained by assumptions, anxieties, stereotypes, and unequal power and resources. If I am right that the perception of asymmetry, whatever its cultural or other origins, is real and shapes the conduct of both parties then we must analyze it as a point of departure in understanding such relationships of unequal resources, privilege, and power that began differently as equal, horizontal relationships. Thanks as usual for your rigorous engagement.

 

 

 

Toyin Falola

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Jun 27, 2021, 9:33:33 AM6/27/21
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Moses:

The real problem, to me, is that the argument can only be framed within specific cultures as the intricacies tend to be local than universal. Dell in Austin and Arisekola in Ibadan are both wealthy, but 200 people will not gather in front of Dell’s house in Austin and as they did for Arisekola. Asymmetrical relationships can be maintained in many cultures—as they do in many of them—as the concept itself is mediated by other complicated variables, notably social payments, social transactions, cultural obligations, and social disease (Polanyi formulated the social disease argument in the 1950s), etc. Cultures also allow title taking, polygamy, etc. to “destroy” wealth acquisitions.

 

TF

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Biko Agozino

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Jun 27, 2021, 11:28:23 AM6/27/21
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Aristotle believed that the only true friendship is between people who are unequal because equal friends are more likely to be rivals. The Igbo disagree and maintain that all heads are equal and so if you have more money than your friends, the right thing is to lift them up by helping them to establish their own businesses, teach them your craft,  or to pay school fees for their children or even build houses for them. Nyerere said that this is why Africans (and the entire pre-capitalist world for that matter) could go on for millennia without producing many millionaires but also without producing many homeless people. Wealth is to be shared and not to be hoarded because no one takes anything to the land of the ancestors. We teachers practice this by sharing our knowledge with all and making friends without assuming that everyone must be of the same academic rank in order to be friends. Sociologists postulate that, according to the mating gradient, men tend to date down and women date up in age, wealth, education and even height. Friendship is not asymmetrical, it is reciprocal.

Biko

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Ibrahim Abdullah

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Jun 27, 2021, 3:16:42 PM6/27/21
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When did Igbo emerge as an identity that defines all who call themselves Igbo? Was there an Igbo identity before 1800? The pre-capitalists socio-economic formations in that part of Nigeria was predominantly communal the Agbor Kimgdom and Onitsha were the exceptions. 

Where and when did this Igbo Mbuntu emerge? Is this Mbuntu--crass romanticisation of communal Africa--not a distortion of history? 

Moses Ochonu

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Jun 27, 2021, 3:17:06 PM6/27/21
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The popular cliche says “scholars analyze the world as it is, not as they wish it to be.” So, my brother Biko, when you say that “Friendship is not asymmetrical, it is reciprocal,” are you analyzing friendships and indeed all human relationships as they exist or as you wish them to exist?

More importantly, can a relationship not be both asymmetrical and reciprocal/transactional?



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On Jun 27, 2021, at 10:28 AM, 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



Toyin Falola

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Jun 27, 2021, 3:37:32 PM6/27/21
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Moses:

I am actually enjoying this.

The word “friendship” has travelled in time, so that today it is difficult to understand its meaning. I have had long exchanges with Afolayan, the professor, and Afolayan, the sage.

I don’t see Professor Afolayan of UI as my friend, which allows me to scold him. I see Baba Afolayan as my friend which does not allow me to scold him. The relationship is different. He is older than me. One time I needed to release a book to meet a December 17 public launching. I called at Osogbo to go to Ibadan to assist me to proof read it and stay in a hotel. I knew upfront that he would never say “No”.

It is strange to me when someone says he has 3000 friends on social media!

Friendship is a very serious matter. I don’t bother by what people say of me. Indeed, I just dismiss them. But I will bother if a friend says the same of me. Anyone whose burial ceremony I will not attend, come rain, come storm, is not my friend.

In Yoruba culture of the older one, I cannot call a woman my friend. Now they do. I don’t have a single woman friend that we went to school together—a gender-based asymmetry.

And there are mediations of age. I am a patron of associations in Austin, and a younger man will not even seat closer to me, talk less of ever becoming my friend. I love Farooq because of his great intellect, but he is not my friend. Cornelius calls him my deputy and Moses as my successor! I laugh, not knowing that the relationship with Moses and Farooq is constructed on dissent.

You need to develop this into an essay, but ground it, say in Idoma culture. It must be grounded.

Biko Agozino

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Jun 28, 2021, 8:53:43 AM6/28/21
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The Igbo have always been Igbo even before Adam and Eve were created, according to Catherine Acholonu. The idea that Igbo identity was invented by the white man is a form of colonial mentality. The Igbo have been Igbo long before there was anyone known as a European. Dike, in his doctoral dissertation, made the mistake of confusing geopolitical organization with linguistic identity that is based on a common language just liker the Greeks who identified as Athenians or Spartans for political purposes but still identified as Greek city states. Usman made the same mistake in his doctoral dissertation by thinking that Kanawa identity was mutually exclusive from Hausa identity even though ther Hausa speakers knoew that the city states belonged to their brothers and sisters. Mamdani swallowed the confederal identity-less whopper by suggesting that it was colonial law that defined the Igbo as Igbo in order to rule over them. Na lie. Dewspite the parapo wars, the Yoruba always identified as the children of Oduduwa long before political regionalism.

Asaba Igbo and Onicha Igbo still refer to the core Igbo as nwa onye Igbo or child of the Igbo as if they are not Igbo too. That denialism is more recent and may have been shaped by the experience of the recent genocide against the Igbo that forced many Igbo in the peripheries to deny being Igbo in order to escape the peculiar history of Igbophobia. The history of denialism may also be deeper given that the enslavers believed that the Igbo did not make good slaves, which may have forced many to pass as other African nationalities.

Brexit shows that English people still do not fully accept being Europeans but they have always been Europeans, in my humble opinion.

Biko

Biko Agozino

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Jun 28, 2021, 8:55:02 AM6/28/21
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Moses, the law giver, if you think that a world of equality is the way I want to see the world rather than what it, can we conclude that your asymmetrical worldview is the way you wish the world was structured rather than the way it is? 

The assumption of asymmetrical friendship presupposes that it is only the rich friend who gives something to the poor friend but the poor also give a lot to their rich friends in the form of feelings of fulfillment and even help defending them behind their backs when bad belly people bad mouth them. Ask the poor people what is keeping the rich friend alive and they will tell you that it is only their prayers and Holy Ghost Fire that keep the witches from destroying the man and pulling him down.

 The statement of the Igbo that all heads are equal is a universal truth, especially in democracies, referring to the fact that the ancient Roman law of homo sacer or enslaved people that are worthless who could be killed without any consequence is universally repudiated. No matter your race, gender, status or wealth, you have only one head just like everyone else and if you cut off the head of a beggar (the way that a warrior did on the cover picture of Falola's memoire - Counting the Teeth of a Tiger), you will pay for it. That is what we mean by Ishi aka ishi, a head is no bigger than a head. It is not debatable - that is just how the world is and not how we wish it to be.

Biko

Farooq A. Kperogi

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Jun 28, 2021, 8:55:49 AM6/28/21
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Oga,

In my own Borgu--specifically Baatonu-- culture,  it would be intolerably impudent, even irreverent, for a nonentity like me to call a legendary father figure and accomplished scholar and mentor of scholars like you a "friend."  You're, properly speaking, a "father"--in the fictive kinship terminological sense of the term.

Although there's increasing vulgarization of the semantic boundaries of notions of friendship thanks to social media, the vast symbolic, not to mention generational, asymmetries between us would still overstretch the elastic semantic limits of the idea that I'm your "friend." 

It's already too much undeserved honor on me that I can send you emails and call your cellphone when I want to, but to call me your "friend" is to smolder me with excessive, unmerited flattery. 

Farooq 

Twitter: @farooqkperogi
Blog: www.farooqkperogi.com


Sent from my phone. Please forgive typos and omissions.

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Moses Ebe Ochonu

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Jun 28, 2021, 8:56:21 AM6/28/21
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Oga Falola,

Yes, relationships and friendships come in different forms, but in each one there is an expectation of mutuality and reciprocity even if there is asymmetry or the perception of it. It seems that our African ancestors were able to formulate two broad principles of relationship between non-consanguineous parties. One, of course, is a relationship of equals, in which there is a solidarity founded on common trajectories and a shared age/status/socioeconomic/professional station. The second is the unequal or asymmetrical type, whether the asymmetry is the result of power, age, status, and class differentials. Our African ancestors developed modalities for modulating the asymmetry in such relationships, coming up with what social scientists and humanities Africanist scholars now call client-patron relations. Patronage and clientage entail obligations and responsibilities. I believe that these obligations and responsibilities shift and get defined in elastic ways as individuals and cultures construct the ethos of friendship and negotiate its boundaries. But the generic invention of patron-client arrangements, along with its expectations and benefits, remains valid and useful because it grounds the mutual expectations at the heart of such relationships.

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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Jun 28, 2021, 8:56:46 AM6/28/21
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I agree with Biko that true friendship  ( in the strict sense) is not asymmetrical but reciprocal.

I also agree with his sociological hypothesis of gender dating.  The key word is tend.

The elastic word' frienship' is the problem here as it is often used loosely.  This is why I consider myself having a few friends that I could count on my fingers since childhood.  Usually my friends know I am their friend.  But many believe the word acquaintance and friend are interchangeable; they are not.  

This is why we have the saying God show me friends, I know my enemies.  It is the acquaintances parading themselves as friends that the saying refers to.

No one can have 3000 friends on the social media in this strict sense of friendship.  They are mere followers with shared interests.



OAA




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-------- Original message --------
From: Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>
Date: 27/06/2021 20:45 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Asymmetrical Relationships: AReflection and Response

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Moses:

I am actually enjoying this.

The word “friendship” has travelled in time, so that today it is difficult to understand its meaning. I have had long exchanges with Afolayan, the professor, and Afolayan, the sage.

I don’t see Professor Afolayan of UI as my friend, which allows me to scold him. I see Baba Afolayan as my friend which does not allow me to scold him. The relationship is different. He is older than me. One time I needed to release a book to meet a December 17 public launching. I called at Osogbo to go to Ibadan to assist me to proof read it and stay in a hotel. I knew upfront that he would never say “No”.

It is strange to me when someone says he has 3000 friends on social media!

Friendship is a very serious matter. I don’t bother by what people say of me. Indeed, I just dismiss them. But I will bother if a friend says the same of me. Anyone whose burial ceremony I will not attend, come rain, come storm, is not my friend.

In Yoruba culture of the older one, I cannot call a woman my friend. Now they do. I don’t have a single woman friend that we went to school together—a gender-based asymmetry.

And there are mediations of age. I am a patron of associations in Austin, and a younger man will not even seat closer to me, talk less of ever becoming my friend. I love Farooq because of his great intellect, but he is not my friend. Cornelius calls him my deputy and Moses as my successor! I laugh, not knowing that the relationship with Moses and Farooq is constructed on dissent.

You need to develop this into an essay, but ground it, say in Idoma culture. It must be grounded.

 

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>
Date: Sunday, June 27, 2021 at 2:17 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Asymmetrical Relationships: A Reflection and Response

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Toyin Falola

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Jun 28, 2021, 9:09:47 AM6/28/21
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Moses:

Your last sentence shifted the argument:

But the generic invention of patron-client arrangements, along with its expectations and benefits, remains valid and useful because it grounds the mutual expectations at the heart of such relationships.

Patron-Client is far different from your original point. If structured as patron-client, there is no argument to make but shifts to points of insurgency and not friendship, as a client is seeking sabotage moments. My city of birth was one of the most notorious during the nineteenth century. An individual must buy the protection of a warlord if there was no one in his family. Patrons and clients are not friends.

TF

Toyin Falola

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Jun 28, 2021, 9:10:20 AM6/28/21
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Biko:

There is no such a thing as “The Igbo have always been Igbo even before Adam and Eve!” You cannot eat your cake and have it. If you accept the Biblical origin mythology, there were no people before then. The Igbo arrived after Adam and Eve!

There have always been people, but Yoruba, Idoma, Igbo, as identities, have always been plastic.

TF

 

From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday, June 28, 2021 at 7:54 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Asymmetrical Relationships: A Reflection and Response

Toyin Falola

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Jun 28, 2021, 9:30:34 AM6/28/21
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Not to change the brilliant take of Moses, I must quickly add a dimension from some cultures:

When friendship develops over time, strengthened by tests, the terminology changes to “family.” They are no longer friends, but family members. If I want to ground it, I will use local terminologies.

And you can then use marriages to cement it, as my best childhood friend and classmate later married my younger sister, so that Moses’ asymmetry becomes dissolved.

I have told Moses to go full scale into public history as this may actually be where his God-given talent lies. He has a way of saying things that command serious attention.

TF

Moses Ebe Ochonu

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Jun 28, 2021, 12:11:02 PM6/28/21
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Is there no zone of honorary friendship into which exemplary "inferiors" are admitted? The vernacular articulation of this type of earned friendship between asymmetrical parties is articulated in the form of the popular adage that if a child washes his/her hands well, they can eat with elders, "elders" here of course being a stand-in for other kinds of status distinctions marked by wealth, knowledge, accomplishments, etc.

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Biko Agozino

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Jun 28, 2021, 12:11:22 PM6/28/21
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Oga Toyin, history is the turf of you and Moses. I am only a sociologist eavesdropping here. I know that all available evidence point to the African origin of humanity. Catherine Acholonu wrote a trilogy on the ancestors of Adam. If it was written by a white man, many Africans will be lapping it up as biblical truth.

I agree with you that political organizations may change but the people remain the same. The Igbo have always been Igbo, the Hausa Hausa, and the Yoruba Yoruba. Dike, Usman, and Mamdani were decentered by Eurocentric authors into asserting the European Invention of Africa thesis of Mudimbe. Africans invented humanity, including Europeans and everyone else. 

That was the argument of Diop in Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology. He debunked the mythology of polygenesis according to which the Europeans believed that they descended from angels or from a different kind of monkey. Diop defended the thesis of monogenesis with a common African ancestor and Acholonu makes a similar argument with evidence from linguistics, human language having originated in Africa according to Philology and to Chomsky. Science has since proven the African origin incontrovertibly right.

As for the Adaam (I have failed, in Igbo) and Eve (light) story of creation, we all know that Africans have their own stories too, including that of Obatala (he has entered, in Igbo - the Igbo are the ancestors of the Obatala, according to Ifa, they are related) and that of my village where we believe that we are the children of Mr and Mrs Chi na Eke. Religion is a free country where you believe what you choose and choose what you believe so long as you are not oppressing the children of God and your hand is clean. 

Prime Minister Disraeli was once asked if he agreed with Darwin that we descended from apes. He answered that when it comes to a choice between angels and monkeys as our ancestors, he and his family will stick with the angels and Mr Darwin was welcome to go with the apes. Ha ha ha.

Biko

Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Jun 28, 2021, 12:11:34 PM6/28/21
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Intriguing.

What is public history?

Thanks

Toyin

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Toyin Falola

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Jun 28, 2021, 12:24:17 PM6/28/21
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Moses:

In what you have just described, terminologies exist but not as in the English word, “friend”. To go back to the Afolayan example, the terminology is that of aburo (junior brother).

Last week, I was with ASUU chairman, Lagos Branch, and he and others refer to Moses Ochonu as Omo Baba (Falola’s son), and the tonality, each time, becomes the code, whether they want to express approval or disapproval. That tone, in many cultures, is significant.

I still don’t know how the project of that asymmetry can be done outside the framework of a specific culture. I have been at UT Austin for 30 years but I won’t use the word “friend” for those that I have known for that long.

TF

OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Jun 29, 2021, 3:52:06 AM6/29/21
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Oga Biko:

People never remained the same through the ages.  They mirrored the changes in the political organisations even if their names remain the same.

The different cultures and people that specific people encounter over the ages inflect their cultures and outlook.

The Yorùbá during the reign of Aláàfin Sàngó were not the same as the Yoruba today no matter the amount of continuities; there were also ontological discontinuities.  This is why some historians argue you can never capture the past as it really  was in any historical narrative.


OAA



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-------- Original message --------
From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: 28/06/2021 17:16 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Asymmetrical Relationships: AReflection and Response

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Oga Toyin, history is the turf of you and Moses. I am only a sociologist eavesdropping here. I know that all available evidence point to the African origin of humanity. Catherine Acholonu wrote a trilogy on the ancestors of Adam. If it was written by a white man, many Africans will be lapping it up as biblical truth.

I agree with you that political organizations may change but the people remain the same. The Igbo have always been Igbo, the Hausa Hausa, and the Yoruba Yoruba. Dike, Usman, and Mamdani were decentered by Eurocentric authors into asserting the European Invention of Africa thesis of Mudimbe. Africans invented humanity, including Europeans and everyone else. 

That was the argument of Diop in Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology. He debunked the mythology of polygenesis according to which the Europeans believed that they descended from angels or from a different kind of monkey. Diop defended the thesis of monogenesis with a common African ancestor and Acholonu makes a similar argument with evidence from linguistics, human language having originated in Africa according to Philology and to Chomsky. Science has since proven the African origin incontrovertibly right.

As for the Adaam (I have failed, in Igbo) and Eve (light) story of creation, we all know that Africans have their own stories too, including that of Obatala (he has entered, in Igbo - the Igbo are the ancestors of the Obatala, according to Ifa, they are related) and that of my village where we believe that we are the children of Mr and Mrs Chi na Eke. Religion is a free country where you believe what you choose and choose what you believe so long as you are not oppressing the children of God and your hand is clean. 

Prime Minister Disraeli was once asked if he agreed with Darwin that we descended from apes. He answered that when it comes to a choice between angels and monkeys as our ancestors, he and his family will stick with the angels and Mr Darwin was welcome to go with the apes. Ha ha ha.

Biko

On Monday, 28 June 2021, 10:55:47 GMT-4, Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:


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Biko Agozino

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Jun 29, 2021, 11:51:04 AM6/29/21
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Olayinka, 

I agree with you. People are no longer the people they used to be even a few years later. Philosophers say that we never step into the same river Niger twice because the river is not the same and the people are not the same again.

However, you must agree with my intervention in historiography where the assertion that white men invented our identities is taken for granted by historians because those making the assertion are intellectual giants. As a non-historian, I am not persuaded by the claim that the Igbo in Onicha were not Igbo because they identified with the Obi of Onicha, that Hausa people in Kano were not Hausa simply because they identified as Kanawa or that the Yoruba in Ibadan were not Yoruba because they identified with the Oyo kingdom or even that Africans were not Africans until Scipio Africanus named them after himself. Na lie o. No be so?

Biko

Toyin Falola

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Jun 29, 2021, 11:55:29 AM6/29/21
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Biko:

Identities are constructed!

Biko Agozino

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Jun 29, 2021, 3:02:45 PM6/29/21
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Agreed. But people are not socially constructed. They may assume different identities but they remain more or less the people we know. Abi no be so?

Biko

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